I have about 6500 email messages in a Pine mailbox that I need to retrieve data from. From my readings so far, I'm working under the assumption that Pine uses the "mbox" format for mail (using pine v4.53 on a linux box). It stores all email from one mailbox in a flat text file. Please let me know if I'm wrong about the mbox format.

    Constraints and goals:
  1. Read all the messages and get what I want (see below for specifics)
  2. I will be looking at every single message in the mailbox
  3. I can safely ignore header information, except for Subject
  4. There will be no attachments
  5. If all goes well, I will be using this script once to collect the data, and that's it.
  6. I'm an Object-oriented noob (never had to use it yet)
I've been reading, and the sheer number of mbox and mail parsers available has me a little turned around. So I'm looking for advice before I begin writing the script.

I've looked at: this node. He asks the same question, but didn't give file specifics. I hope I pinpointed it above.

this node. Where the guy uses Mail::MboxParser to parse.

There was this: Mail::MboxParser::Mail::Body

Mail::Box From the page, this looks like I could just do a foreach on every email. Which I think would work, but how slow is it going to be?

I also saw mention of just looking for paragraphs that start with
"^From <email address> <date>"
Should I do this, because it seems like it could be the most basic way of doing it?

the mail will look like this: 

...normal header info...
Subject: Backup SUCCESS
..rest of header...

Backup ID: 123
Path:   <path>
Backup Type: one of 3 different types
Size:  <in Kbytes>
...some other junk I don't need...
Start time:   Wed May  5 09:36:40 2004
End time:     Wed May  5 09:43:19 2004
Errors:       0
some other stuff
Elapsed time: 0 hr 6 mn 39 s

[download]

I'm grabbing the ID,the path, the type of backup, the size, and i'm going to throw it into a mysql table. The ID is the primary key, but the size and elapsed time aren't stored anywhere after the email, so we want to grab it for comparisions and whatnot.

Given what I'm faced with, which way should I go?

Thanks.

In reply to Parsing a Pine mailbox by tdp05

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